Not a Cut Above the Rest

There are times when the food is good, and the service is good, and that makes for a memorable experience. Then there are times when the food sucks, but the service was so good it made you forget that experience. Then there are times when the food is good, but the service is questionable and makes you wonder why there is a disconnect. This review is from the latter experience.

While in Vegas for my friend’s 40th birthday we had a group dinner at Cut by Wolfgang Puck. Given Wolfgang Puck was the original celebrity chef and he brought hip cuisine to Los Angeles and Vegas via Spago you could say expectations were high.

Cut is conveniently located in the Palazzo which is tied to the Venetian Hotel. It’s right off the main casino floor, so it isn’t very hard to find. The decor is very, how might one say, 1980’s coked out investment banker. I honestly thought I was in Dorsia (if I could be so lucky to get a reservation). Group dining table was an octagon (making sharing of off white business cards and conversation much easier), and the seats were a lighter olive office chair. When I say office chair, I’m not joking, I’m pretty sure no restaurant has ever had swivel chairs like these in the dining room. These were fully capable of the swivel and slide of an office chair. Inside the dining room were giant 36 x 36 framed photos of celebrities faces. We were so lucky to have Denzel Washington and Brad Pitt gaze upon us, along with another female celebrity that I could not identify.

So we started our order with some cocktails and wine. I had the Ball and Chain cocktail (pictured) to start which I believe was their version of a Los Angeles cocktail only with more lemon. The girls at our table asked for the sommelier to help pick out a dry Riesling. This is where things went awry. The sommelier tried to direct us to the $250 bottle, but after guiding him to a more approachable price point, he found a dry Riesling. We asked him to confirm if it would be dry as all of our friends did not want anything sweet. He confirmed it wasn’t sweet at all. So when he presented the bottle at the table, he poured a glass, and it was sweet. One person said it was like sweet white grape juice. Not to be jerks, but we passed a glass around the table, and everyone agreed it was sweet.

This gets me to my next point. If you have no idea what something tastes like, then you should probably just say I don’t know. There was no recovering that guy’s credibility for the rest of the meal. Even the table side old fashioned’s which were suggested, which were delicious, were treated as suspect.

Now for the meal itself, it was pretty good. Coming from Dallas where there are 22 similarly priced steakhouses in one square mile, it’s a high bar to hurdle. I had a 35-day aged filet mignon that was Nebraska corn fed. I was surprised, as was one of our other guests that they would list corn fed so prominently on the menu (https://wolfgangpuck.com/dining/cut-las-vegas/menus), as there are many documentaries that are pretty scathing about that. Regardless of the social implications, I still ordered it medium rare with a topping of blue cheese from Point Reyes Creamery. The steak came out as expected. However, regardless of how well everyone’s meal came out all we could talk about was how off the sommelier was.

Long story short the meal was an 8, but the service was a 5. All in, it gets a high 6.